People


Main Protagonists in the Origins of AIDS Debate

Adapted from The River

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Ardouin A.
Jamaican émigré who died of PCP infection in Brooklyn in 1959.

Professor Peter Aaby
Danish scientist and principal researcher into
HIV-2 in Guinea-Bissau.
Professor Margaret Agerholm
Oxford-based virologist who wrote to the BMJ
questioning the safety of the CHAT vaccine trials in the Congo.

Professor Jan Albert
virologist at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.
Professor Jennifer Alexander
South African microbiologist and proponent of OPV/AIDS theory.
Professor Steve Alexander
scientist at Biotech Research Inc., Rockville, Maryland,
who developed a version of the Western blot assay.
Professor Jonathan Allan
microbiologist and SIV expert working at the Southwest
Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, Texas.
Lawrence K. Altman
medical writer for the New York Times.
Dr Armand André, former director of blood bank in Liege, Belgium,
who tested the bloods of 175 Lindi chimps in the fifties.
Professor L. J. André
former captain of the French colonial medical service based at
the Institute Pasteur in Brazzaville; vaccinated population around
Mitzic in Gabon with Lépine vaccine in 1957. Later, director of the
military institute of tropical medicine in Marseille.
Stewart Aston
former head of the virus and rickettsial vaccine production
laboratory, Lederle Laboratories.
Professor Francoise Barré-Sinoussi
virologist and AIDS specialist based at the Institut Pasteur,
Paris.
Professor Georges Barski
tissue culture expert from Pierre Lepine’s virology
department at the Institut Pasteur in the early fifties; visited
Alexandre Jezierski in the Congo to collect blood samples for polio
research.
Professor Claudio Basilico
microbiologist from the New York University School of
Medicine; co-chair of the expert committee convened by the Wistar Institute to
examine the OPV/AIDS theory.
Dr Anne Bayley
British doctor and former chief surgeon at the University Teaching
Hospital, Lusaka, Zambia.
Dr Wilfrid Bervoets
inspector of hygiene for the Congo at the time of the CHAT
trials.
Dr Gunnel Biberfeld
virologist from the National Bacteriological Laboratory in
Stockholm; specialist in HIV-2 research.
Dr Bob Biggar
conducted AIDS research (including some controversial
epidemiological studies) under Robert Gallo in the eighties.
Dr Howard Binns
director of the research institute at Muguga, Kenya, at the time of
Koprowski’s visits in 1955 and 1957.
Professor David Bodian
Polio researcher from Johns Hopkins University who
identified the three types of polio virus; later, conducted
poliovirus research in chimpanzees.
Professor Margerete Böttiger
Swedish virologist who assisted Sven Gard with
polio vaccine research at the Karolinska Institute in the fifties
and sixties.
Jean Brakel
A sanitary agent for the Laboratoire Médical de Stanleyville in the late
fifties and who assisted Gaston Ninane with the vaccinations in response to polio
epidemics in Kivu.
Professor Paul Brutsaert
Senior professor from the tropical institute, Antwerp,
Belgium who opened the virus symposium at Stanleyville, in September
1957.
Professor Anthony Bryceson
Physician at the London Hospital for Tropical
Diseases who treated Senhor L., the first known HIV-2 related
patient, in 1978.
Dr Louis Bugyaki
Hungarian vet who worked in Stanleyville between 1956 and
1959 and who helped look after the Lindi chimps.
Dr Margerete Bundschuh
German missionary doctor who worked in Tanzania for
over 30 years.
Dr Fritz Buser
Swiss pediatrician who helped conduct trials of various polio
vaccines, inluding Koprowski’s, in Berne in the fifties.
Professor Victor Cabasso
Lederle virologist who took over as Cox’s deputy after
Koprowski left in 1957.
Dr Michele Carbone
Italian scientist who linked SV40 and asbestos exposure to the
development of tumours such as mesothelioma.
David Carr
The ‘Manchester sailor’ who died in 1959 from an AIDS-like illness
characterised by PCP and CMV infections.
Dr Wilson Carswell
A Scottish surgeon who became a leading figure in the fight
against AIDS in Uganda.
Hubert Caubergh
Sanitary agent who participated in, and documented, the CHAT
vaccinations in Ruanda-Urundi between 1958 and 1960.
Dr Francis Charlton
Californian physician and father of a brain damaged child
(AAC) who was fed with a Koprowski polio vaccine in 1956 and whose
excreted virus was used as the basis for CHAT vaccine.
Dr Robert Colebunders
Belgian clinician from the Tropical Institute at Antwerp
who has conducted extensive AIDS research in the Congo.
Steve Connor
Science journalist who wrote exposé about the apparent David Carr
HIV-1 contamination for The Independent in 1995.
Dr André Courtois
Belgian physician, son of Ghislain Courtois.
Dr Ghislain Courtois
Belgian physician who headed the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville throughout the fifties and who established Lindi Camp
in collaboration with Koprowski. Distributed OPV to different parts
of the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, and later helped organise
vaccination campaigns with Sabin’s OPV in Belgium itself.
Professor Herald Cox
Head of viral and rickettsial research at Lederle Laboratories,
American Cyanamid, between the forties and sixties.
John Crewdson
Renowned Chicago Tribune journalist.
Julian Cribb
Australian scientific journalist and author of ‘The White Death’, the
first book to discuss the OPV/AIDS hypothesis in detail.
Professor James Curran
Effective head of the CDC’s AIDS program from 1981
(when it was known as the Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic
Infections) until 1995 (when it was known as the Division of HIV/AIDS); US
assistant surgeon-general, 1991-1995.
Michael Kent Curtis
Tom’s brother; a professor of law from Wake University who
wrote a lengthy paper about the legal implications of the OPV/AIDS
controversy and the suppression of dissent.
Tom Curtis
American journalist and author of Rolling Stone article entitled ‘The
Origin of AIDS’.

Tom Curtis

Daniel D.
Belgian construction worker who worked in central Africa in the
seventies and who died of AIDS-like conditions in 1981.
Robert Daenens
Belgian caretaker at Lindi camp in the late fifties.
David Dane
British virologist; George Dick’s deputy at Queen’s University, Belfast,
in the fifties and sixties.
Professor William Darrow
Sociologist and sole non-medical scientist in the CDC
Task Force on KSOI (later, division of HIV/AIDS).
Dr Jack Davies
British physician based in Uganda between 1940s and 1960s.
Dr P. De Brauwere
Inspector-general of hygiene in Brussels at the time of the
CHAT vaccinations in the Congo.
Professor Kevin De Cock
Belgian-born physician, epidemiologist and specialist in
HIV-2 research.
Professor Edward De Maeyer
Virologist who joined the Rega Institute, Leuven, in 1957.
Jean De Medina
Headed the animal capture station at Epulu, eastern Congo;
formerly Camp Putnam.
Professor Pieter De Somer
Head of virology at Leuven University and Rega
Institute, Leuven from the 1950s onwards; co-founder of RIT
(Recherche et Industrie Thérapeutif).
Brigadier Antonio De Spinola
Portugese governor of Guinea-Bissau between 1968 and 1973.
Professor Friedrich (‘Fritz’) Deinhardt
Worked under the Henles at the virology department of the
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in the fifties; conducted
hepatitis studies at Lindi Camp in 1958.
Professor Jean Deinhardt
British virologist who joined the Wistar Institute in 1959
and who married Fritz Deinhardt soon afterwards.
Dr Jean Delville
Belgian virologist based at Elisabethville, Congo, in the
fifties.
Professor Jan Desmyter
Head of virology, Rega Institute, Leuven, Belgium.
Professor Ronald Desrosiers
Harvard virologist based at the New England Primate
Research Center; member of the Wistar’s expert committee looking into the
OPV/AIDS theory and a leading proponent of using live vaccines against AIDS.
Paulette Dherte
Nurse and technical assistant at the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville and Lindi camp in the fifties.
George Dick
British virologist who staged trials of Koprowski’s OPVs in Belfast,
Northern Ireland, in 1956.
Pierre Doupagne
Lab technician who worked at the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville in the fifties.
Dr Charles Dricot
Chief physician of the Belgian Congo in 1957 when the CHAT
field trials began.
Professor Peter Duesberg
Molecular biologist and AIDS researcher who, for more
than ten years, championed theory that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Gaetan Dugas
Canadian air steward who became known as Patient Zero, in allusion
to the theory that he was the source (or key disseminator) of HIV in
North America.
Professor Renato Dulbecco
Italian virologist and Nobel Laureate who, in the fifties,
developed the techniques of trypsinisation and plaque purification.
Blaine Elswood
San Francisco AIDS activist and one of the developers of the theory
that Koprowski’s OPVs might have sparked the AIDS epidemic.
Professor John Enders
Microbiologist who developed tissue culture technique for
isolating and growing viruses.
Professor Max Essex
Harvard virologist and AIDS researcher who mistakenly
identified an SIV of African Green Monkeys, which was in fact
cross-contamination with a macaque SIV.
Professor Paul Ewald
Evolutionary biologist and author of ‘Evolution of Infectious
Disease’.
Mrs Sadayo F.
60 year old Japanese-Canadian who died of typical AIDS-like
infections in Montreal in 1945.
Agnes Flack
Medical director of Clinton Farms, the women’s prison in New Jersey;
helped with the Ruzizi field-trial of CHAT in 1958.
Professor Alan Fleming
Hematologist and AIDS epidemiologist.
Professor Tom Folks
Head of retroviral research at the Centers for Disease Control.
Dr Michel Forro
Hungarian doctor who worked for Vicicongo, the construction and
haulage parastatal based at Aketi, Congo; officially oversaw the
first mass trial of Koprowski’s vaccines in 1957.
Professor Cecil Fox
American pathologist and tissue culture expert formerly with
the National Institutes of Health.
Professor John Fox
Virologist from Tulane University, New Orleans, who provided
poliovirus isolates which were used as the basis for several polio
vaccine strains, including Fox [poliovirus type 3] and P-712
[poliovirus type 2].
Professor Thomas Francis
Jonas Salk’s former teacher who helped organize the
first IPV trials in the US.
Dr Alvin Friedman-Kein
New York physician who recognised high incidence of
Kaposi’s Sarcoma in American gay men and co-authored first report on
KS in 1981.
Dr Stig Froland
Norwegian physician and AIDS specialist.
Professor Patricia Fultz
American virologist based at Birmingham, Alabama, who
reported on altered pathogenicity of SIVs after transfer into new
hosts.
Dick G.
28 year old engineer and former marine who died of AIDS-like
illnesses in Memphis, Tennessee in 1952.
Professor Carleton Gajdusek
Nobel Laureate for his work on the prion disease,
kuru. According to Preston Marx, Gajdusek may have played a crucial
role in the spread of Simian AIDS in American primate research centers.
Professor Robert Gallo
The first to isolate a human retrovirus, HTLV-I. He also
isolated HIV (after Montagnier and Levy) but called it HTLV-III,
thereby inaccurately implying that it was from the same family of
retroviruses as HTLV-I and HTLV-II. Friend of Hilary Koprowski.
Feng Gao
Virologist and PCR expert who provides sequences for Beatrice Hahn’s
team in Birmingham, Alabama.
Professor Sven Gard
Swedish virologist and developer of an improved IPV, used in
Sweden since the 1950s.
Dr John Garrett
Virologist at the National Institute for Biologic Standards and
Control, Potters Bar, U.K, who conducted experiments suggesting that
there was little risk of oral polio vaccines becoming contaminated
with SIVs.
Laurie Garrett
Journalist and author of ‘The Coming Plague’.
Professor Robert Garry
Microbiologist from Tulane University, New Orleans, who
found HIV in autopsy samples from Robert R.
Professor James Gear
Senior virologist at the South African Institute for Medical
Research; developer of South African oral polio vaccine in African
green monkey tissues and long term associate of Hilary Koprowski.
Professor Henry Gelfand
Virologist from Tulane University, New Orleans, who
carried CHAT vaccine from Brussels to Leopoldville for the 1958
vaccination campaign in the latter city.
Professor Paul Gigase
Belgian physician who worked at Katana Hospital, eastern
Congo, in the fifties and who, in the eighties, carried out studies

of KS and AIDS in the same region.

Professor Charles Gilks
Parasitologist who proposed theory that the AIDS epidemic
originated from malaria research which involved injecting monkey and
ape blood into humans.
Professor Sergio Giunta
Italian virologist who proposed that AIDS could have
come about through the increased capture of African monkeys for
scientific research.
Tom Gordon
Associate director of Yerkes primate research center, Atlanta,
Georgia.
Dr Michael Gottlieb
Los Angeles doctor who, in June 1981, co-authored the first
report on AIDS to be published in the medical literature.
Dr Sidney Gottlieb
CIA scientist who headed a team which developed and tested
various experimental drugs and biological weapons in the fifties and
sixties.
Professor Jaap Goudsmit
Dutch retrovirologist and author of ‘Viral Sex’ which
features a controversial account of the prehistory of AIDS.
Dr Victor P. Grachev
Helped with the mass poliovaccine campaign in the Soviet
Union in the 1950s; later worked for Biologicals department at the
WHO.
Sally Griffin
Research and editorial assistant to the author, 1996-7.
Mirko Grmek
French medical historian and author of ‘History of AIDS’.
Herbert H.
German concert violinist and bisexual who died from what was almost
certainly AIDS in 1979.
Professor Beatrice Hahn
German-born microbiologist based at Birmingham, Alabama.
Professor Bill Hamilton
Oxford-based evolutionary biologist, Royal Society
research fellow, and sometimes considered the originator of
sociobiology; probably the most eminent supporter of the OPV/AIDS
theory.
Professor Herwig Hamperl
German microbiologist and specialist in Pneumocystis
carinii research in the fifties.
Dr Jimmy Harries
Kenyan-based physician who, in 1956, discussed possible
vaccination schemes in Africa with Hilary Koprowski.
Professor Masanori Hayami
Japanese virologist and head of SIV/HIV research
team at Kyoto University.
Dr Leonard Hayflick
Biologist who took charge of tissue culture development at the
Wistar Institute in 1958; developer of WI-38, a human diploid cell
strain.
Hélène
Congolese woman who died from AIDS-like infections in Kinshasa
in 1962.
Professors Werner and Gertrude Henle
Husband and wife team who ran the
virology department at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
(CHOP) from 1939 until the nineties.
Dr Fergal Hill
Cambridge-based molecular biologist who collaborated with the
author, testing archival tissue and serum samples for presence of HIV.
John Hillaby
British author and scientific journalist who visited Lindi camp
in 1957.
Professor Maurice (‘Max’) Hilleman
American virologist,
co-discoverer of SV40 and developer of Heptavax B vaccine at Merck
Sharpe and Dohme.
Professor Vanessa Hirsch
American virologist based at the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland.
Professor David Ho
Director of the Aaron Diamond Research Center and member of
the OPV/AIDS committee convened by the Wistar Institute.
Professor Simon Wain Hobson
British virologist based at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
David Huminer
Israeli researcher who identified possible cases of pre-epidemic
AIDS from the medical literature.
Professor Klaus Hummeler
German virologist who worked at CHOP in the fifties
and collaborated with Koprowski on polio vaccine research.
Dr Andrew Hunt
Visiting physician at Clinton Farms during the fifties who
helped oversee several of the early Koprowski vaccine trials.
Professor Constant ‘Stan’ Huygelen
Took over from Pieter De Somer as director of RIT in the early
sixties.
Dr Drago Ikic
Zagreb-based virologist who collaborated with Koprowski in
Croatian trials of polio vaccines made in monkey kidney and in WI-38.
Edward Jenner
Developer, in 1796, of the worlds’ first vaccine, effective against
smallpox.

Edward Jenner

Dr Duncan Jeremiah
Manchester physician and organiser of vaccination
campaigns who wrote to the British Medical Journal complaining about
Koprowski’s approach to vaccine trials.
Professor George Jervis
Director of laboratories at Letchworth Village, a center for
mentally handicapped children in New York state; helped at the
Ruzizi vaccine field trial in 1958.
Alexandre Jezierski
Polish émigré vet who worked in the Belgian Congo in the
forties and fifties and who developed his own sets of live and
killed human polio vaccines at his Gabu-Nioka laboratory.
Professor Philip Johnson
American virologist formerly based at the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland.
Yvon K.
Belgian man who did voluntary work in the Congo in the seventies and who
later died of AIDS.
Professor Phyllis Kanki
Harvard virologist and colleague of Max Essex.
Dr Moriz Kaposi
Hungarian dermatologist who practised in Vienna in the
nineteenth century; identified several new skin conditions including
the sarcoma named after him.
Anicet Kashamura
Congolese sociologist, writer and politician; author of ‘Famille,
Sexualité et Culture’.
Dr Abraham Karpas
Cambridge-based virologist and proponent of the theory that
the AIDS epidemic began with monkey-related sexual practices in
central Africa; also proposed an amplification role for reusable
needles in the advent of the epidemic.
Dr Olen Kew
Polio expert and director of molecular virology at the Division of
Virological Diseases, CDC.
Leonard Kopf
The first patient to be diagnosed with Kaposi’s Sarcoma, 1867.
Dr Irena Koprowska
Married Hilary Koprowski in Poland in 1938 and in 1997
wrote a revealing autobiography entitled ‘A Woman Wanders through
Life and Science’.
Professor Hilary Koprowski
Virologist and developer of a set of oral polio vaccines;
the first to feed oral polio vaccine to humans in 1950.
Adriaan Kortlandt
Dutch primatologist who visited the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville in 1960.
Daniel Koshland
Editor of Science magazine, who declined to publish Bill
Hamilton’s submission on the OPV/AIDS controversy.
Professor David Kritchevsky
Biochemist who worked at Lederle Laboratories and
later followed Hilary Koprowski to the Wistar Institute.
Professor Kamil Kucera
Czech parasitologist; specialist in Pneumocystis carinii
research.
Walter Kyle
New Hampshire attorney who propounded theory that AIDS epidemic
originated from Sabin’s OPV, taken topically as an anti-herpes
treatment.
Senhor Jose L.
The first known sufferer from HIV-II related AIDS, believed to have
been exposed in Guinea-Bissau by 1966.
Dr Georges Lambelin
Jezierski’s deputy at Lambelin at Gabu Nioka in the 1950s.
Dr Monique Lamy
Virologist at the Rega Institute, Leuven; later put in charge of
vaccine production at RIT in the late fifties.
Dr Linda Laubenstein
Physician and colleague of Friedman-Kein at New York
University Medical Center.
Professor Bernard Le Guenno
Formerly virologist based at the Pasteur Institute,

Dachau,Senegal; now head of research into hemorrhagic fevers at the
Pasteur in Paris.

Professor André Lebrun
In the late fifties, director of the Marcel Wanson Institute
of Hygiene, Leopoldville, and effective head of hygiene for the
Congo; helped coordinate the vaccination campaign in Leo,
1958-1960.
Professor Gerasmos (‘Mike’) Lecatsas
Chief virologist at the Medical University of
Southern Africa (MEDUNSA), Pretoria, and proponent of the OPV/AIDS
theory.
Professor Jacques Leibowitch
French physician, raconteur and writer on AIDS.
Professor Edwin Lennette
Virologist who worked with Koprowski at the Yellow
Fever Research Service in Rio during the Second World War; later
tested various biological agents for the US army Chemical Corps.
Dr John Leonard
Senior registrar at the Manchester Royal Infirmary when David
Carr was a patient in 1959.
Professor Pierre Lépine
Head of virology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris from 1941
for several decades; developer of an inactivated polio vaccine
administered in many Francophone countries.
Professor Jay Levy
San Francisco virologist who identified retrovirus ARV (later
called HIV) shortly after Luc Montaigner
Gilbert M.
Belgian mine official who worked in the Congo, and who died of
AIDS-like diseases in 1977.
John Maddox
Former editor of Nature magazine who declined to publish Bill
Hamilton’s submission on the OPV/AIDS controversy.
Edna Mahan
Governor of the women’s prison at Clinton Farms for forty years,
including the period of the Koprowski vaccine trials.
Dr Brian Mahy
British virologist, director of the CDC’s division of viral and
rickettsial diseases.
Professor Jonathan Mann
American physician; head of Projêt SIDA in Kinshasa in
the early eighties and head of the WHO’s Global Program on AIDS from
1986 to 1990. Killed in plane crash in 1998.
Maria
Rwanda-born HIV-infected wife of Daniel D.
Professor Brian Martin
Sociologist of science who heads Science and Technology
Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia; publisher of
Louis Pascal’s paper: “What Happens When Science Goes Bad?”
Professor Preston Marx
American primatologist and expert in HIV/SIV research;
frequent visitor to West Africa; representative of the Aaron Diamond
AIDS research Center at LEMSIP (the Laboratory for Experimental
Medicine and Surgery In Primates).
Professor Joseph Melnick
Dean emeritus of Baylor college, Houston; respected
commentator on polio vaccines for several decades.
Professor Karl Meyer
Swiss born doctor who headed the George Williams Hooper
Foundation, a San Francisco-based research institute, from the
forties onwards; helped set up vaccine trials for Koprowski in California.
Dr Hector Meyus
Director of the hygiene service of Ruanda-Urundi at the time of
the Ruzizi vaccinations in 1958.
Dr Jean-Louis Michaux
Jean Sonnet’s assistant at Lovanium University Hospital,
Leopoldville, in the fifties and sixties.
Professor Philip Minor
Principal virologist at the National Institute for Biologic
Standards and Control, Potters Bar, U.K, in the nineties.
Professor Luc Montaigner
Virologist from the Pasteur Institute, generally
considered to be the first person to identify HIV (then known as
LAV) as the cause of AIDS.
Dr James Moore
Member of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, Lexington
Kentucky, who arranged for retrospective HIV testing of stored sera
from drug addicts taken in 1971 and 1972.
Professor Joseph Mortelmans
Primatologist and chimpanzee expert; worked in
Stanleyville as a vet in 1956.
Dr Jacques Morvan
Researcher from Laboratory of Clinical Biology at the army
medical school in Bordeaux, France.
Professor Arno Motulsky
American geneticist from the University of Washington,
Seattle, who collected blood samples in the Belgian Congo and
Ruanda-Urundi in 1959.
Professor Kary Mullis
Inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique
for molecular analysis.
Dr Gerry Myers
Director of the HIV Sequence Database, Los Alamos, New Mexico,
which produces HIV/SIV sequences and phylogenetic trees.
Professor André Nahmias
Professor from Emory University, Atlanta, who
retrospectively tested African blood samples and found L70, the HIV
positive sample from Leopoldville, taken in 1959.
Dr Anders Naucler
Swedish doctor based in Guinea-Bissau who wrote PhD thesis
on HIV-2.
Dr Tom Nelson
Superintendent of Sonoma, a Californian center for handicapped
children, in the fifties; collaborated with Koprowski in testing
OPVs in child patients.
Dr Gaston Ninane
Belgian virologist who worked under Ghislain Courtois at
Stanleyville in the fifties; helped vaccinate in the Ruzizi valley
and Province Oriental.
Arvid Noe
Norwegian sailor (between 1961 and 1965) and one of the earliest
confirmed AIDS fatalities, in 1976.
Thomas Norton
Chief laboratory technician under Koprowski at Lederle
Laboratories until 1957; later on, assistant director at Wistar
Institute, Philadelphia.
Louis O.
Belgian cartographer who worked in the Congo until 1968 and who
died of AIDS in 1988.
Basil O’Connor
Lawyer and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, headed the National
Fund for Infantile Paralysis and launched the ‘March of Dimes’,
which raised public funds for polio research.
Dr James Oleske
Newark-based pediatrician who cared for some of the first AIDS
sufferers in North America, including a girl who was probably
infected in 1973 or 1974.
Dr Paul Osterrieth
Belgian physician and virologist who worked at the Laboratoire
Médical de Stanleyville between 1957 and 1960.
Professor Joseph Pagano
Trained at the CDC Epidemiology Intelligence Service
(EIS) and who followed Stanley Plotkin to the Wistar Institute,
where he organized several polio vaccine trials.
Louis Pascal
Philosopher and arm-chair researcher; founding father of OPV/AIDS
theory.
Professor Louis Pasteur
French veterinary scientist, developer of first vaccine
against rabies and in whose honour the Pasteur Institutes found in
Francophone countries around the world are named.
Dr Stéphane Pattyn
Worked at Laboratoire Médical d’Elisabethville under Jean
Delville in the fifties and staged polio antibody studies around the
Belgian Congo; now an eminent virologist at the Tropical Institute
in Antwerp.
Julian Peetermans
Joined RIT at its inception in 1956 and effectively headed
vaccine production there until the nineties.
Dr Martine Peeters
Virologist at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp,
Belgium; specialist in research on SIV-positive chimpanzees.
Robert and Joan Phillips
Husband-and-wife photographer and journalist team who
reported on the Ruzizi vaccinations in March 1958.
Dr Tony Pinching
London-based immunologist and AIDS researcher.
Professor Peter Piot
Aids researcher and latterly head of UNAIDS, the United
Nations AIDS program.
Professor Stanley Plotkin
Koprowski’s former associate at the Wistar Institute and,
in the nineties, managing director of Pasteur Merieux, the
pharmaceutical giant.
Dr Anne-Grethe Poulsen
Danish specialist in HIV-2 research who worked with
Peter Aaby in Guinea-Bissau.
Dr Edmund Preston
Quaker physician from Moorestown, New Jersey, who helped
organise the first small-scale US trial of Koprowski vaccines in the
open community.
Professor Abel Prinzie
Belgian virologist who worked at the Rega Institute from
1954 and later, in the sixties, at RIT.
Professor F. (“Smithy”) Przesmycki
Head of virology at the state institute of
hygiene, Warsaw, who collaborated on the Polish trials of CHAT and
Fox.
Robert R.
St Louis teenager who died from an AIDS-like condition in 1969.
Dr Grethe Rask
Danish surgeon who worked in the Congo and who died of typical

AIDS infections in 1977.

Dr Herbert Ratner
Chicago physician who proposed theory that Salk’s IPV,
contaminated with SV40, was the source of the human AIDS epidemic.
Dr Robert Redfield
Aids researcher based at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Dr Tom Rivers
Rockefeller Institute virologist and arbiter of polio vaccination
policy in the forties and fifties.
Dr Manuel Roca-Garcia
Lederle virologist under Herald Cox.
Gilbert Rollais
French hunter who captured chimpanzees for Lindi camp.
Professor Robert Root-Bernstein
Author of ‘Rethinking AIDS’, which proposes a multi-factorial
theory of origin.
Dr Giovanni Rovera
Director of the Wistar Institute after Koprowski’s departure in
1991.
Professor Ruth Ruprecht
Harvard virologist who strongly challenges the safety of
the live AIDS vaccine proposed by Ronald Desrosiers.
Alice S.
22-year-old secretary who died of Pneumocystis carinii in 1964 in Pulman,
Washington.
Professor Albert Sabin
Virologist who developed a set of oral polio vaccines which,
since 1961, have been adopted around the world.
Dr Carl-Rune Salenstedt
Director of vaccine production at the National
Bacteriological Laboratories, Stockholm, Sweden.
Professor Jonas Salk
Virologist who developed an inactivated polio vaccine which
was administered to millions in Britain and America, before being
superseded by Sabin’s oral vaccine.
Dr Kingsley Sanders
British tissue culture specialist who worked for the Medical
Research Council in the fifties and sixties and who investigated the
suitability of African monkey kidneys for polio vaccine preparation.
Professor Carl Saxinger
Conducted AIDS research under Robert Gallo at the
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, in the eighties.
Professor Meinrad Schar
Chief of sera and vaccines at the Swiss Public Health
Department; helped organize trials of several OPVs and IPVs in the
fifties and sixties.
Dr Barry Schoub
Senior virologist at National Institute of Virology, South Africa.
Dr Gordon Scott
British vet, formerly based at Muguga, Kenya, who visited
Jezierski at Gabu-Nioka in 1954.
John Seale
British venereologist who proposed theories that AIDS epidemic might
have originated through Cold War biological weapons research or
through inceased availability of reusable needles and syringes in
central Africa.
Dr Jacob and Lilli Segal
East German husband-and-wife team who proposed theory
that American biological weapons research sparked AIDS epidemic.
Professor Paul Sharp
British molecular biologist who has written extensively on
HIV and SIV.
Randy Shilts
San Francisco-based journalist and author of And The Band Played On.
Died of early AIDS in the early nineties.
Dr Joseph Smadel
Chief of viral and rickettsial research at the Walter Reed Army
Medical Center in the fifties; later the associate director of the
US Public Health Service.
Professor Smorodintsev
Soviet virologist who participated in the testing of the
Sabin vaccine strains in the USSR.
Eva Lee Snead
San Antonio physician, debarred, who wrote Some Call It “AIDS” –
I Call It Murder!, which proposes that AIDS came from
SV40-contaminated IPV.
Dr John Snow
Medic whose pioneering epidemiological investigation into the
London cholera outbreak of 1854 led to the cessation of the epidemic.
Professor Jean Sonnet
Belgian physician based at Lovanium University Hospital,
Leopoldville/Kinshasa, in fifties and sixties; pioneering AIDS
researcher until his death in 1992.
Dr Fred Stare
Nutrition expert from Harvard University who received chimpanzees
from Lindi camp.
Dr Tom Starzl
Controversial scientist from University of Pittsburgh and leading
proponent of xenotransplantation – in this case, transplanting
baboon livers into humans.
Professor Ernest Sternglass
American physicist who proposed theory that low-level
radiation exposure was the principal causative factor behind the
AIDS epidemic.
Dr Jan Stijns
Director of the medical laboratory at the Tropical Institute in
Leopoldville who may have been responsible for collecting L70, the
first HIV positive blood sample, in 1959.
Professor Joseph Stokes Jr
Quaker who headed pediatric department of Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia in the fifties; collaborated on Koprowski’s
polio vaccine trials. Later appointed director of CHOP.
Robert and Theodore Strecker
Right-wing American AIDS activists who proposed
that the Soviets and the WHO had produced the AIDS virus as a
biological weapon.
Dr Trevor Stretton
Senior house officer at the Manchester Royal Infirmary in the
fifties; tended to David Carr.
Dr Raphael Stricker
San Francisco immunologist who co-wrote articles on
OPV/AIDS with Blaine Elswood.
Dr Wolf Szmuness
Polish émigré virologist who pioneered studies of the hepatitis B
vaccine, Heptavax-B, in the US and elsewhere in the late seventies
and early eighties.
Professor Max Theiler
Rockefeller Institute virologist and developer of live vaccine
against yellow fever.
Professor Lise Thiry (formerly Quersin-Thiry)
Head of virology at the Institut Pasteur satellite in Brussels;
also taught at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Later a socialist
politician.
Dr Geoffrey Timms
Physician in charge of vaccine procurement in Kenya at the
time of Koprowski’s visit in 1957.
Dr Mike Tristem
British molecular biologist, former student of Fergal Hill; now
head of the virology labs at Imperial College, Ascot.
Dr Phillipe Van De Perre
Belgian AIDS specialist based in Kigali, Rwanda.
Dr Rachel Van Der Meeren (neé Yeld)
British researcher who monitored Tutsi refugees in Tanzania in
the early sixties.
Professor Jozef Vandepitte
Chair of microbiology at the University of Lovanium in
the Belgian Congo in 1959, when he helped Arno Motulsky collect
blood samples. Temporarily headed the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville in 1958.
Professor Michel Vandeputte
Established the first virology laboratory in
Leopoldville in 1956 and moved to the Rega Institute, Leuven in
1960.
Dr Bernard Vandercam
Belgian AIDS physician who took over from Dr Jean
Sonnet at St Luc Hospital, Brussels, in 1992.
Dr Boris Velimirovic
Former WHO official who worked in the Congo in the early
sixties.
Major-General Jack ‘Black Mamba’ Walden
Former Brigadier of the Tanzanian People’s Defence Forces who
played a major role in the invasion of Uganda in 1978-1979.
Professor Caroline Weekes-Levy
Head of viral vaccine research at Lederle
Laboratories, American Cyanamid.
Dr Karl F. Wefring
Norwegian pediatrician who helped care for Arvid Noe’s
youngest daughter.
Professor Robin Weiss
British virologist and AIDS researcher.
Professor Hans Wigzell
Head of the National Bacteriological Laboratory, Stockholm
and, latterly, Rector of the Karolinska Institute. Co-chair of
consultative group on live AIDS vaccines for the WHO.
Dr Tadeusz J. Wiktor
Polish-born vet who served in the Congo in the fifties and
met Hilary Koprowski in Kenya in 1955. Joined the Wistar Institute
in the sixties, to work on rabies research.
Professor George Williams
Pathologist who conducted autopsy on David Carr and
who provided tissue samples from that autopsy which tested
HIV-positive by PCR.
John Rowan Wilson
Author of Margin of Safety, a history of polio vaccines publishe
din 1963.
Helen Winternitz
American author of East Along The Equator – A Congo Journey.
Dr Zofia Wroblewska
Polish researcher at the Wistar Institute.
Dr John Wyatt
St Louis pathologist who identified CMV in tissues of Dick G.
George Y.
Japanese-Canadian who died of PCP infection at Toronto General
Hospital in 1959.
Veronique Y.
Congolese woman, wife of Louis O., who left the Congo in 1968 and
died of AIDS in 1987.
Dr Daniel Zagury
French doctor based in Kinshasa, Congo, who injected himself
and other volunteers with an experimental AIDS vaccine in the
mid-eighties.